I have a fun omega-3 anecdata point going right now. A friend of mine researches the stuff in mouse models and told me it's extremely beneficial, but you need to buy a fancy brand to avoid rancid oil or heavy metal contamination both of which ~null out the benefits. She recommended Sports Research.
I bought some and started taking it and my 1:1 bullet chess ELO jumped from 850 to ~1070 over the next couple weeks.
I play chess a bit like sushi ginger for the mind - purge working memory with a short intense task to context switch. I intentionally don't study openings or anything so I can use it as a benchmark for mental horsepower with a reasonably slow drift in the baseline from 'actually learning chess'.
My friend says this effect is way too big to actually attribute to the vitamins and it has to be placebo etc but I'm thoroughly enjoying the idea that omega-3 Nick would win 3/4 bullet matches against deficient Nick.
Consumer Labs offers as a subscription service testing of various vitamins Including fish oil. They perform a great service, and I think it's economical in terms of determining if what you're buying is really what you want.
Heavy metal contamination is classically not a problem because the fish oil is distilled. My guess is your researcher friend has fallen victim to the marketing of the pharmacological industry-- Although I do want to indicate they do have value, probably not the 500 percent markup that they put on what in essence is a generic product.
Some natural fish oils are not distilled and do have this problem-- These are normally marketed as natural or cod liver oil or something that should hit your radar pretty quick. Your friend's concern about rancidity is clearly a problem And pretty well understood by people for years if you have any familiarity with chemistry. Omega threes get their name from the fact that you have a weird bend on the end of a long carbon molecule. This is susceptible to oxidation. This is true for any Omega 3 molecule regardless of its length Or it's sourcing.
This includes omega-3 "drugs" like Vascepa (pure EPA) and Lovaza (EPA and DHA combination).
Fortunately in testing, they have not found widespread issues with rancidity, although they definitely have found pockets. My normal suggestion to everybody is by a high volume manufacturer that you know is tearing through the product quite rapidly. My top suggestion is Costco. Then make sure you keep your fish oil in the refrigerator, and churn through it on a regular basis.
Sashimi is typically served with very small portion sizes.
You're not getting as much fish oil from sashimi as someone taking concentrated pills every day. However, whether or not it matters is a different story. The benefits of fish oil appear be inversely proportional to the size of the study (as in this 1000-person study that has some hints of p-hacking) so I wouldn't worry about it.
It's strange to being using Hacker news as a nutrition advice, but this is something that I have been reading research on Pubmed for years. (Actually going back to the grateful med....).
Approximately 50-60% of brain weight is made up of lipids, of which about 35% consists of omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs). Of the omega-3 PUFAs present in the brain, DHA accounts for more than 40% of total omega-3 PUFAs in neuronal tissue, especially in gray matter.
Now I know this is slightly different than the OP, but I consider the primary reason for incorporating Omega3 in your diet is specifically to give your brain the basic building blocks that it needs to create the right structure. And the issue is you have to eat Omega-3. It's not something that you can manufacture: you can take a shorter chain and potentially increase the length of the carbon to get it all the way up to an EPA or DHA, but even this falls off as you age. So I don't consider taking flaxseed oil a good idea.
Without spending a long time on this, Long term supplementation I believe we can come up with an extremely strong line of evidence that suggests it helps neurological and emotional health. Now while there may be other benefits, this one is so massive and so clear to me, this is the reason that you want to make sure that you get this basic building block.
What is clear the western diet for the most part is severely lacking in in Omega-3 (or often called N3 PUFA in research), therefore if you're not thoughtfully measuring what you take in, you very well possibly could be running low especially considering that there is a significant Sigma in terms of what people need to have a healthy brain.
So now let's talk about the food supply. The problem is virtually every fish in the world has mercury higher than what you want. The only fish that looks like it has an acceptable level of mercury is salmon in certain geographies such as Alaska. My guess is you're actually eating some type of farm raised salmon, And I would have concerns unless you exactly understand the sourcing.
Without getting into the details, It is phenomenally difficult to come up with clear guidelines for biological humans that have wild diversity in terms of genetics and how your body processes food stuff. If anybody tells you they absolutely know the right dosage for you, immediately you should call BS. The data is way too far ranging to suggest a simple and clear case of what any individual needs.
Now keeping that in mind, I would suggest that most people probably need around one gram worth of EPA slash DHA in their diet basically forever. Depending upon your genetics maybe you could go down to half of this.
This is not a number you should guess at, and with things such as perplexity, You can find out how much EPA and DHA you are taking in in your salmon. You should be able to find out the number of ounces and talk to the cook about what they are serving. And 100 grams of salmon depending upon if you're eating clean salmon which has lower levels of EPA/DHA or farming salmon which has more oil but normally is dirtier, you should see somewhere between 1 to 2G.
> It's strange to being using Hacker news as a nutrition advice
Bodybuilding forums are always like 10-20 years ahead of cutting edge research in terms of off-label uses for things, hyper-efficient non-mainstream protocols, etc. Granted they're also 10-20 years ahead in terms of BS generation.
But I've learned a ton of useful things about nutrition from HN. It helps that nobody knows anything about nutrition anyway.
I agree with all you say here. I’ve been studying this for over 15 years because my family suffered from early heart attacks, like below 50 years of age. My brother died of a heart attack at 48.
This heart disease risk along with psychiatric problems my family, including suicides led me to getting my genetics. Once I had them, it became clear how much I need long chain poly unsaturated fatty acids and specifically higher omega-3 than the normal European Caucasian population.
This is primarily because of polymorphisms I have in two genes FADS1 and FADS2.
Currently, I pretty much eat negligible amounts of short chain poly unsaturated fatty acids. The major components of my diet are cold water seafood, and muscles and oysters. Plus a lot of seaweed (this is from another prism I have, I am a FUT2 non-secretor. I also eat a very low amount of carbohydrates.
Now I’ve had serious psychiatric problems in my life. Three attempted suicides, for hospitalizations, and I was on a ton of medications. But guess what, I’m no longer on any medication‘s, my blood pressure has normalized, and my lipids are normal. And I can’t count the other of other minor bothersome symptoms I’ve had that have vanished.
No, I am a huge outlier, but I am also sort of a canary in a coal mine. Because while I am extremely sensitive to deficiencies of omega-3 fatty acids. Anyone who does not get at least the minimal amount of polyunsaturated fatty acids will end up having health problems. Whether you need long chain or short chain polyunsaturated fatty acids is going to depend on your genetics.
My genetic haplotype is K1, which is uncommon for Europeans to have. The dates back to over 10,000 years ago during the Ice Age. I also seem to have a lot of finish heritage, which I can possibly trace back to the Sami people who are a very high fat high omega-3 diet.
But anyway, you’re right, this is not a number. You should guess that because omega-3‘s can really thin out peoples blood. I need this but for other people this might be a huge problem.
Yes. A real, raw source is almost certainly better than a processed and treated source. Packaged fish oil is sometimes rancid, unnoticeable to you, and those oxidation products are harmful. It is also heavily loaded with antioxidants, without which fresh fish oil goes rancid within hours, and which have their own detrimental effects when in excess.
Flax only contains ALA, not DHA or EPA. You need three of them and your body can create the 2 later from the former, however that capacity degrade with age hence the EPA/DHA recommandation.
I also started taking the Sports Research omega-3 capsules early this year. Seems the consensus for taking any omega-3 is that it's single-source and wild caught which is why I chose that brand. My biggest benefit has been my eyesight with way less floaters.
However I started taking creatine this summer to help with my recovery from running now that I'm older. I will say I feel it's done more for my cognitive function than the omega-3 did.
> biggest benefit has been my eyesight with way less floaters.
Huh, did you also have to get any laser surgery done to get rid of them totally? My research always indicated that once you had floaters, they were basically just there forever and your brain just learned to work around them.
My eye doc said I had a slight case of blepharitis and that I should use high quality fish oil and eye lid cleaning wipes. The oil would help the membranes or gland in the eye lid, can’t remember which.
No surgery and I don't wear any vision correction, they aren't gone 100% just reduced greatly. I really only ever notice them when going from dark to light. Typically never inside my house under normal light, mainly just outdoors.
My diet does lack seafood overall. While I love salmon my family doesn't. If we eat seafood it's mainly catfish and shrimp though, as we are in Louisiana.
Not all floaters. The information in the doctors clinic can lag behind 10-20 years, best to keep an eye on studies that might not reach them, since no doc can read everything.
How much do you take? Evidence-based dosage guidance for supplements is hard to find. Pointers to primary sources with empirically supported dose ranges for common supplements—magnesium, zinc, and multivitamins—appreciated!
This really is a good use for Perplexity. I suggest a prompt along the lines of "what is the pubmed indications for what somebody should take for omega-3 or n3 pufa for X". This way your pull the primary research and you can have a conversation to your needs.
With that written, generally the literature indicates that somewhere around 1-2G daily of EPA/DHA is in the range of what is fringe mainstream. There is a lot of variance around this and a lot of debate. For example, you'll get a debate about the ability of the body to convert 22 EPA into 24 DHA, so some will push DHA as the preferred source for the body.
The range of 1 to 2 g daily of DHA+EPA has been suggested based on the daily consumption of 2 g or more that is typical for populations like the Japanese, who include a great proportion of marine food in their diet and who appear to derive health benefits from this.
I agree that for now there is no better evidence about which is the optimal daily intake.
Quantities about 10 times less than this might be sufficient to avoid any obvious signs of nutritional deficiency, but are unlikely to be optimal.
The capacity of converting ALA from vegetable oil into DHA and EPA may vary a lot between humans and it is typically lower in males than in females and also lower in older people than in young people.
The less risky choice is to ensure that you eat enough DHA+EPA. Perhaps one does not need 1 to 2 g of DHA+EPA daily, but eating it is unlikely to be harmful, while not eating it carries definite risks.
If you lean at all toward evolutionary biology, You tend to pay attention to the idea that earlier man had a diet which had a much higher ratio of Omega 3 to Omega 6.
I would add that vegetable oils probably are not the ideal solution just beyond the idea that you need to extend the carbon chain up to something that can be used for your body in some type of pharmacological type role. The modern western diet has a ratio of somewhere around 15 to 20 to one in terms of Omega 6 to Omega 3. Virtually every vegetable oil will continue to drive that ratio toward a imbalance toward Omega 6.
It is true that early man specifically during the Ice Age, had a much higher omega-3 diet. But many of you are not genetically ice age people. I know I am because of my haplotype, which is K1.
Most European Caucasians would probably do better on a high omega-3 short chain poly unsaturated fatty acid diet. Like the omega-3’s from flaxseed. The change from gather cultures to farming culture changed the way we processed polyunsaturated fatty acids.
Flax was included in the first set of domesticated plants, together with the cereals barley, emmer wheat and einkorn wheat, and together with a few legumes, including lentils and peas.
This set of domesticated plants does not appear random, because any more restricted set would have made impossible the substitution of the animal food used previously with plant seeds.
The seeds of cereals and of legumes together could provide an acceptable protein source, while the flax seeds could add the alpha-linolenic acid, which can be transformed by humans, with modest efficiency, into the needed DHA and EPA.
We know that the first generations of people who had become dependent of agriculture had serious health problems in comparison with their ancestors, which have become less severe after many generations, presumably after they have learned to better balance their diet and when those who have survived might have been better adapted to eating such food.
Nevertheless, regardless where you are located you do not know the properties of your genes, unless you do some very expensive study, by using various diets and monitoring how they influence the content in your blood of various substances, e.g. of DHA and EPA when eating various sources of omega-3 fatty acids, of vegetable or of animal origin.
In the absence of such a study, the safer hypothesis is that you belong to the people who are not efficient at the elongation of ALA into DHA and EPA, so it is safer to eat food with enough DHA and EPA, instead of eating food with ALA, like flax seeds or oil, and hoping that you belong to the people for whom this is good enough.
This is similar for a few other conditionally-essential nutrients, which can be produced by humans, but in most cases only in too small quantities compared to necessities, so it is safer to ensure that they are present in food, e.g. vitamin K2, choline, taurine, creatine.
There’s a study that 3g is needed to move triglycerides and HDL in a good direction. I did that under a doctor’s direction and it worked as intended. Didn’t do anything for my cholesterol otherwise which is one of the confounders in some of the studies. Sometimes people get better LDL, sometimes not. vLDL improved markedly but maybe I was just taking better care of my diet between tests.
I don’t mind taking them so I kept the Omega 3s and started taking others for my LDL issues.
I take fish oil and eat seafood for this exact reason. I probably get 4 to 5 g of omega-3 a day at least. And that really moved all my lipids in a positive direction.
Diet and exercise is the first thing. In my specific case saturated fats and sugars increase my LDL. I take fiber pills (pulls out cholesterol containing compounds used in digestion), “Red Yeast Rice” which is the yeast that makes statins - I’m taking it as a low dose statin -, Bergamot extract which interferes with cholesterol production, and Plant Sterols which block dietary cholesterol absorption.
Six months will show if it’s working. If not I’ll go on a full dose of a statin.
Omega use and consumption in general can be one thing, and in many cases need higher consumption or timing, relative to the health condition or goal you need to support.
Ask Claude Opus to search, verify, source and then quote back passages and provide a link back the information for the supplement and any particular health needs and start reading.
Keep modifying the prompt until you don't need to review it as much, but still review it. I have a pretty long one like this now and it almost doesn't seem real. Still double check what it returns. It's easy enough to take the retrieved studies to your doc for verification too
.
For example, if targeting the brain, levels can be much higher.
Magnesium Threonate crosses the blood brain barrier, which is great, leaving Magnesium Biglycinate for the rest of the body.
How long was your bullet chess elo stable at 850 (and how often were you playing) before this experiment began? I'm asking because the act of playing constitutes practice, which could itself cause a rise in your elo. Bit of a confounding factor there, potentially.
> but you need to buy a fancy brand to avoid rancid oil or heavy metal contamination both of which ~null out the benefits
I didn't know about the rancidity problem, thank you. Knew about the contamination issue. To avoid it, I tried to source oil derived from sources lower in the food chain, either vegan algae oil, or krill oil. But krill oil is super expensive, when compared to fish oil, with lower levels of EPA/DHA per capsule. The problem with algae oil it's that those I've found contain only DHA. Not sure about the relative importance between EPA/DHA, although.
"Algae oil" is a marketing term that has been chosen for sounding better, especially to vegans, than "Schizochytrium oil" or "oil from stramenopiles".
Schizochytrium is an organism somewhat similar to a fungus, but which is not a fungus and it is distantly related to brown algae and diatoms (but unlike those, it is not an alga; it never had chloroplasts acquired by symbiosis).
The first cultivated strains of Schizochytrium produced only DHA, but now there are strains that also produce EPA. At least in Europe, you can easily find Schizochytrium oil that contains DHA + EPA in a 2:1 proportion. For most humans, especially for most males, both DHA and EPA are needed, because the capacity of interconversion between them is typically insufficient in comparison with what is needed.
However, even if it has become cheaper in recent years, Schizochytrium oil remains about 3 times more expensive than fish oil, per its fatty acid content. There are also many vendors that try to deceive their customers by selling diluted oil at about the same price as the decent vendors, therefore at a price many times higher per the fatty acid content.
In Europe, in recent years I have preferred Möller's Pure Cod Liver Oil, which is quite tasty, either alone or added to food. Using bottled oil is much better than using capsules. Besides being cheaper and not ingesting garbage capsules, tasting the oil makes certain that it neither is rancid nor has any suspect content. This is also true for Schizochytrium oil. Many decades ago, cod liver oil had a reputation of something that children were forced to eat, despite its bad taste. This is completely untrue nowadays, when the oil is made either immediately after catching or from fish that have been frozen immediately after catching, so the oil has not degraded and it retains a pleasant taste.
If Schizochytrium oil will become cheaper, i.e. with a price not more than double in comparison with pure cod liver oil, then I will switch to it, removing from my diet the only ingredient that is obtained by killing animals.
I highly recommend them as they test well for freshness, but if you aim to get around 2G of EPA/DHA, you'll need 8 capsules. To your point that's a lot of capsules if you don't like swallowing pills. Compare with prescription below:
Kirkland Signature Fish Oil provides 151.8 mg EPA and 119.1 mg DHA per tablet, totaling 270.9 mg EPA+DHA (Softgel).
Prescription Lovaza (Rx)* provides 465 mg EPA and 375 mg DHA per tablet, totaling 840 mg EPA+DHA (Softgel (Rx)).
Prescription Vascepa (Rx)* provides 960 mg EPA and <40 mg DHA per tablet, totaling ~960 mg EPA+DHA (Softgel (Rx)).
Because of the issues with rancidity, I strongly prefer Costco because they churn through the stuff like there is no tomorrow. Their supply chains seem to be pretty straightforward from OEM to internal warehouse to to clearance. Just make sure to keep it refrigerated and move it from shelf to a cool place in a timely fashion period.
I used to take Nordic Naturals EPA Xtra for a long time in the past and when taking them I'd sometimes have days when my thinking was unusually fluid and clear, something I have never experienced while taking my current brand of Omega 3 (the European Moller's Omega 3 Extra). (There could definitely be other reasons too besides Omega 3 intake.)
The Sports Research Triple Strength capsules just like the Nordical Naturals have much more EPA than DHA (but the ratio is different), so I might give these a try too.
Another piece of personal anecdata related to Omega 3, is that I recently started taking most of it with dinner, and my sleep subjectively feels slightly better than when I used to take them earlier in the day.
You can also get Omega-3 from algae oil (which is where fish get it) to alleviate concerns about heavy metal content. Algae may have heavy metals but should have less than any fish. I know nothing about this particular product, but they came up when I searched for it: https://www.norsan-omega.com/algae-oil/
I do the same thing, except I subscribe to Thorne. I haven't noticed an uptick in perceived brain capacity, etc, but I can tell that my skin and hair are healthier. I started taking it because my cholesterol was all over the place and I desperately want to avoid taking a statin later in life. I'll be retesting that early next year. I've also started eating smoked salmon and canned sardines.
I’d really be interested in hearing what your heritage is, specifically on your mother side. If you read my other post, you’ll understand why I’m curious.
Omega-3 together with vitamin B2 repolarizes microglia from pro-inflammatory state to healing state, so no wonder your brain got a boost. Now, how can I tell if Omega-3 capsules are rancid?
If you buy bottled oil instead of capsules, you can feel its taste, so you can sense whether it is rancid or it has any other suspect taste.
Good omega-3 oil has a pleasant taste, there is really no need to eat capsules made from chemically-modified cellulose or who knows what other material that is not suitable as food.
The omega-3 oil can be mixed with whatever oil you add to your food, e.g. to a salad.
Like I have said, you can buy omega-3 oil as liquid in bottles, even if it may be harder to find than in capsules (but with online shopping it is very easy to find many kinds of such oil).
The pure oil is cheaper and you can feel its taste without having to break capsules. Moreover you do not have to ingest capsules made of dubious substances, besides the desired oil.
Once opened (but preferably also before) such an oil bottle should be kept in a refrigerator.
Some bottled oil includes flavors, e.g. lemon, which mask its natural taste. Unflavored omega 3 oil is preferable.
That would be a great solution, except that such foods are usually much more expensive than an equivalent amount of omega-3 oil.
Moreover, due to the great human stupidity of dumping everything where "it becomes the problem of others", now it has become the problem of everybody that what were previously among the healthiest foods, i.e. most food items of marine origin, nowadays carry significant health risks, due to possible mercury content.
But they do have the advantage of being, you know, food, and not just a bottle of oil. And you can't live on a bottle of oil. You'll still need to buy the food.
Yes, but where I live, in the middle of a continent, not on some sea coast, I can buy food that contains all nutrients, except omega-3 fatty acids, for a price at least 10 to 20 times less than if I would buy food of marine origin.
Adding to that food 10 milliliter of cod liver oil per day, which provides 2 grams of DHA+EPA, requires only the equivalent of 40 US cents per day.
With most capsules, one would need 5 or more capsules for this amount of oil, which would increase the price a lot. To create the sensation of a higher content of DHA+EPA, on many capsule boxes the quantity that is written is for a pair of capsules, not for one capsule. Therefore I consider capsules as more like a scam for increasing oil price than as a useful method of delivery, which is why I have stopped using them many years ago.
Looking right now on Amazon.com, it seems that the US prices for omega-3 oils are significantly higher than in Europe, at least double, the cheapest being labeled as dog food.
I wonder whether there is any difference in quality between those labeled as dog food and those labeled as human food, e.g. if the "dog food" oils are also tested for contaminants. Otherwise, the "dog food" oils seemed not only cheaper, but also better, being pure and unflavored, while the "human food" oils suggested by Amazon were either flavored or in capsules. Here in Europe, I see such pure oils advertised for children and pregnant women, instead of as dog food.
Omega-3 fatty acids are found in a wide variety of food. Having some is good. Do you need as much as the supplement merchants want you to believe you need? Probably not.
Eh, I could see it. When I look at my rating graph it's really easy to correlate with life events. Bad stuff at work, rating drops. Went on vacation, goes way up etc. Just being in a bad mood will fuck up my game, so I def think it's very possible it did affect your game that much. Not to mention that that level of chess is very volatile. A 2200 player would definitely not see the same effects.
I've had surprising success with meshy.ai as part of a workflow to go from images my friends want to good 3D models. The workflow is
1. Have gpt5 or really any image model, midjourney retexture is also good, convert the original image to something closer to a matte rendered mesh, IE remove extraneous detail and any transparency / other confusing volumetric effects
2. Throw it in meshy.ai image to 3D mode, select the best one or maybe return to 1 with a different simplified image style if I don't like the results
3. Pull it into blender and make whatever mods I want in mesh editing mode, eg specific fits and sizing to assemble with other stuff, add some asymmetry to an almost-symmetric thing because the model has strong symmetry priors and turning them off in the UI doesn't realllyyy turn them off, or model on top of the AI'd mesh to get a cleaner one for further processing.
The meshes are fairly OK structure wise, clearly some sort of marching cubes or perhaps dual contouring approach on top of a NeRF-ish generator.
I'm an extremely fast mechanical CAD user and a mediocre blender artist, so getting an AI starting point is quite handy to block out the overall shape and let me just do edits. EG a friend wants to recreate a particular statue of a human, tweaking some T-posed generic human model into the right pose and proportions would have taken me "more hours than I'm willing to give him for this" ie I wouldn't have done it, but with this workflow it was 5 minutes of AI and then an hour of fussing in Blender to go from the solid model to the curvilinear wireframe style of the original statue.
> 1. […] convert the original image to something closer to a matte rendered mesh […]
Sounds interesting. Do you have any example images like that you could share? I understand the part about making transparent surfaces not transparent. But I’m not sure how the whole image looks like after this step.
Also, would you be willing to share the prompt you type to achieve this?
It works if you just plainly describe what you're looking for, I write a new prompt for different images just like "re-render this as a matte untextured 3d model, remove all details except geometric form"
The naming is very confusing. I thought the underlying model was gpt image 1 in the api but transparently shown as part of the same chat model in the UI?
Bad popularizing article, doesn't cover the actual conclusion:
The main points emerging from the combined simulation and experimental study on atmospheric entry of the paper plane are:
• Orbit: The paper space plane de-orbits from LEO extremely quickly
due to its very low ballistic coefficient. Atmospheric entry from a
400 km circular orbit occurs within a few days.
• Attitude: In the free-molecular portion of atmospheric entry,
above ∼120 km altitude, the paper space plane maintains a stable
flow-pointing attitude. Small-amplitude oscillations occur in pitch
and yaw. Although the coupled simulator is not designed for
application at lower altitudes, the results suggest the onset of
uncontrollable tumbling at ∼120 km altitude.
• Heating: Based on the hypersonic wind tunnel test results and
simulation, surface forces acting on the space plane during atmospheric entry are not expected to cause significant deformation.
However, the paper space plane experiences severe aerodynamic
heating in the order of 105 W/m2
(or 10 W/cm2
) for several
minutes. Accordingly, combustion or pyrolysis is expected during
atmospheric entry
It's a shame there's not a more substantial colony in space than the ISS with its own stock of throwaway microcontrollers and paper. If there were someone could make a few transmitters with paper airplanes, fling them out on the next space walk, and we could have a pretty good idea of what actually happens.
Once you have a vehicle made from heat resistant paper that can survive re-entry, with a GPS receiver and a couple of control surfaces you can drop it within a few meters anywhere along your orbital path. If the weather cooperates. "Hi Mom, I'm up in space!"
Any time he goes off on some wild tangent in his books, I assume it's because he just recently learned a lot about it and feels compelled to put that info somewhere. I remember Reamde spending a full two pages on the benefits of lashing tires to your fishing craft.
> Any time he goes off on some wild tangent in his books, I assume it's because he just recently learned a lot about it and feels compelled to put that info somewhere.
Stephenson discussed this a bit in the Long Now launch event[0] for "Polostan" and more or less confirmed what you suspect. He also went on to say that he has learned to reel that in and avoid those "rabbit holes". He avoids such digressions in Polostan, in my opinion to the detriment of the book.
I remember reading this and preceding 'In the Kingdom of Mao Bell' https://www.wired.com/1994/02/mao-bell/ and imagining making those articles went down like in 'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas' book/movie :-)
I found myself reading this more for the excellent notetaking than for the content.
I suspect the discussion was about as charged, meandering, and nitpicky as we all expect a PL debate among deeply opinionated geeks to be, and Jake Edge (who wrote this summary) is exceptionally good at removing all that and writing down substance.
We are talking about extremely competent people who worked on a critical piece of software for years and invested a lot of their lives in it, with all pain, effort, experience, and responsibilities that come with that.
That this debate is inscribed is a process that is still ongoing, and in fact, progressing, is a testament to how healthy the situation is.
I was expecting the whole Rust thing to be shut down 10 times, in a flow of distasteful remarks, already.
This means that not only Rust is vindicated as promising for the job, but both teams are willing and up to the task of working on the integration.
Those projects are exhausting, highly under-pressure situations, and they last a long time.
I still find that the report is showing a positive outcome. What do people expect? Move fast and break things?
I am definitely of the opinion we need to rush away from C. Rust, Go, Zig, etc does not matter, but anything which can catch some of the repeated mistakes that squishy humans keep repeating.
That being said, the file system is one of those infrastructure bits where you cannot make a mistake. Introduce a memory corruption bug leading to crashes every Thursday? Whatever. Total loss of data for 0.1% of users during a leap year at a total eclipse? Apocalypse.
There is no amount of being too careful when interfacing with storage. C may have a lot of foibles, but it is the devil we know.
I agree. And ideally, every time you raise the question and get the "no" response, you learn something about the system you're modifying or the reviewer learns something about your solution. Then you improve your solution, and come back.
Eventually consensus is built - either the solution becomes good enough, or both the developers and the reviewers agree that it's not going to work out and the line of development gets abandoned.
Large-scale change in production is hard, and messy, and involves a lot of imperfect humans that we hope are mostly well-intentioned.
Moving using a 70's technology breaks things. Rust is tested already on other OSes like Windows, Mac (or iOS) and Android and solves several pitfalls of C and C++. Some quotes from the Android team [1]:
"To date, there have been zero memory safety vulnerabilities discovered in Android’s Rust code."
"Safety measures make memory-unsafe languages slow"
Not saying Rust is the perfect solution to every problem, but it is definitely not an outlandish proposition to use it where it makes sense.
> RO desal splits the incoming ~3% salinity stream into two halves, one fresh and one ~6% salinity. This concentrated brine is fed to adjacent brine processing facilities (ideally in both countries) that exploit the region’s abundant solar and geothermal energy to extract potentially millions of tonnes of lithium, sodium, magnesium, chloride, and other metals found in sea water. The resulting depleted brine is piped back to the ocean where it is thoroughly mixed with sea water and discharged.
Casey's proposing we mine the brine for useful minerals. You're right he's glossing over details, but a citation addressing the economics of brine disposal with his proposed processing would add more to the discussion.
We just simply don't need that much brine for useful minerals -- it's a huge cost and you'll be left with massive piles of mostly useless salt.
On one of my hard drives, I've got an engineering / construction plan for a moderately sized intake + discharge for a small RO facility that would've passed muster in Australia, which has pretty reasonable environmental protections. Round numbers - the intake would have cost $25 million and the discharge more like $75 million. You need a massive structure to be able to emit that brine back into the environment in a way that doesn't just nuke the surrounding marine life. Huge pipes + check valves + cascading discharges, all either on the ocean floor if there aren't reefs and other sensitive areas or even worse from a cost perspective, tunneled out to a depth that can handle the amount of salt.
Seawater is ~35g/L of TDS - the author is talking about 5 million acre feet of desal - what's that, 20 million tons of salt annually?
This is doable. Many coastal wastewater systems already have large pipes that extend miles to sea (1), and that's a rounding error compared to the many more miles of pipe routing sewage to the plant (2, pg A-3)
“ In general, anthropogenic activities pollute the coastal marine environment, altering the environment’s physiochemical properties and resulting in changes in marine communities. Physiochemical conditions can be altered by the presence of pollutants, hypoxia, organic enrichment, decreased hydrodynamic conditions, and, more recently, brine discharge (de-la-Ossa-Carretero et al., 2016). Salinity elevation in receiving soil and water bodies and the territorial consequences of brine with high total dissolved solids on benthic marine life close to the discharge site are the most important environmental challenges associated with brine disposal (Miri and Chouikhi, 2005; Panagopoulos et al., 2019).”
Lots more detail in the article on studies of specific populations as well as discussion of mitigations and alternatives.
This guy claims that Lithium may be partially responsible for some weight gain in our population, but also, that desalination plants cause extra lithium as well.
If it was mined out, that would be viable, but if not...
Considering that the brine output of a single large-ish plant might be 150,000m³ per day[1], that's a hell of a mine shaft to take it continuously. The rock with the same volume as a day's brine would weigh a million tons. The entire Aberfan spoil tips were only 2 weeks worth of that much volume (2 million cubic metres).
The gigantic Hambach open-pit mine grows by 0.3km³ a year, so that could take it (but it can't take the Saudi million m³/day plant). By the time the mine is depleted, the resulting 18km³ pit would not be filled by our single hypothetical plant for over 300 years, assuming it won't evaporate. Which leads to:
The evaporation pools might work: they'd "only" have to be 3000 acres (12 km²) to gather the 4GW of solar power at 1kW/m² for 8 hours a day to continuously evaporate that much water daily[2]. Which is certainly large, but not completely impossible. But then there's 2 million tonnes of salt per year which will accumulate continuously over time.
[1] the largest is over a million
[2] not including water not bring a perfect absorber of solar energy or differing insolation
In an environment where solar and geothermal electricity are abundant enough to make this work, it would be far easier to condense water straight from the air by refrigeration.
:D and if you scale this to the point where the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere is affected, you can also use some of the abundant energy to boil the ocean to replace that water vapor. :) Same net effect (water is taken from the ocean and salt is not) without actually moving the salt back and forth.
IIRC we've found some big exoplanets in wild orbits. They tend to form in a circular-ish orbit because that's how you get a big enough chunk of the dense bits of an accretion disk, but interactions with other planets/stars can put eg gas giants into wild orbits after formation.
Please also be careful about selling to incumbents without a strong guarantee (ie contractual penalties) your product will stay in market for many years.
I know smoke detectors and a couple other crappy home goods have been fixed by scrappy upstarts, sold to the losers for <100M, and then shuttered to avoid pivoting the existing business. Heartbreaking lost progress every time it happens.
Almost nobody in tech is interested in the degrowth solution to climate change, we’re all in on increased affluence with tech mitigations for the environmental harms.
Somebody’s gotta book all the electric / / synfuel powered flights ;)
Active vacuum insulation isn’t a thing because you need high vacuum to reduce thermal conductivity at all, because mean free path and therefore specific conductivity grows at the same rate density decreases until mean free path exceeds the characteristic length of your application.
Also, modern VIPs have decades of life if installed properly.
I bought some and started taking it and my 1:1 bullet chess ELO jumped from 850 to ~1070 over the next couple weeks.
I play chess a bit like sushi ginger for the mind - purge working memory with a short intense task to context switch. I intentionally don't study openings or anything so I can use it as a benchmark for mental horsepower with a reasonably slow drift in the baseline from 'actually learning chess'.
My friend says this effect is way too big to actually attribute to the vitamins and it has to be placebo etc but I'm thoroughly enjoying the idea that omega-3 Nick would win 3/4 bullet matches against deficient Nick.
https://www.chess.com/member/nickparkerprint/stats/bullet?da...